For months, a courthouse in London,
England, has been the scene of an especially twisted kind of
obscenity: Author Deborah Lipstadt and her lawyers
daily marshalling mountains of evidence in an effort to
prove the Holocaust happened.

Lipstadt's ludicrous struggle is necessitated by a
libel
suit brought against her by an arrogant amateur
historian and Nazi apologist, author David
Irving.

Lipstadt has said Irving is "among the most dangerous of
Holocaust deniers" or words to that effect, and Irving took
umbrage. He then seized the chance to revive his flagging
fortunes with the libel suit.

He lost the suit yesterday and, in losing, he solidifies
his international status as a victim of the worldwide
conspiracy.

I can tell you now, for the first time, that I am part of
that conspiracy.

I never went to journalism school, so I missed what I
imagine were repeated lectures on objectivity and the
media's role as impartial observers in society.

I don't mean to offend any pigs among our readership, but
I've always thought that was hogwash.

The only truly disinterested journalists I know are dead
journalists. That's what makes them disinterested. Needless
to say, their writing suffers.

But just as a doctor or lawyer doesn't have to love or
even believe her clients to serve them well, neither do
journalists have to agree with their subjects to write their
stories fairly and truthfully. Rather than seeking true
impartiality, good journalism is usually a matter of using
your views and biases, your passions and paranoia to sharpen
your understanding of the story, to refuse to be seduced by
the first easy quote that comes along, and to keep digging
deeper.

We are obliged, however, to strive mightily for accuracy
and fairness. And like the much abused Hippocratic oath
still taken by today's doctors, I think we journalists
should also strive to do no harm. And mostly, I think I
manage to meet those standards.

But life is never that simple.

Journalists are governed by the Heisenberg uncertainty
principle, an idea first developed by physicist Werner
Heisenberg to explain the behaviour of sub-atomic
particles and the difficulties faced in studying them.

Permit me to vastly oversimplify. Heisenberg's principle
states that the act of attempting to observe the momentum or
position of a sub-atomic particle actually affects that
particle's location or motion.

Imagine if police radar guns had the effect of slowing
you down, or speeding you up, or making you change lanes --
and you could never be sure which effect you'd have when you
train your radar beam on a speeding car. In a sense, that is
one of the dilemmas facing physicists studying the building
blocks of matter.

To observe is to change.

This simple principle wreaks havoc with the journalist's
comfortable notions of being a mere observer of the news,
rather than a participant.

It was David Irving who taught me that lesson back in
1992 when I started a chain of events that led to him being
barred for life from Canada, Australia, South Africa and
Lord knows where else.

I knew Irving well, having spent years investigating,
tracking and chronicling the white racist movement. Irving
was an intelligent, sometimes charming, but ultimately
arrogant interview, a man so sure of of his superior
intellect and his ability to bamboozle his listeners that he
routinely walked off rhetorical cliffs, confident he
wouldn't fall.

As an author and historian, Irving's pro-Nazi biases had
reduced him to selling his books via speaking tours
organized by racists and Nazi apologists. The tours could be
lucrative (he bragged to me that he stood to make $80,000
from his 10-city Canadian tour in 1992), but clearly he felt
he deserved better.

But an October 1992 ruling by Canadian immigration
officials that he was unwelcome in this country threatened
to cost Irving even the cold comfort of his racist audiences
and their Canadian cash.

Irving's Canadian lawyer, Doug Christie, had tried
and failed to overturn the immigration decision banning
Irving.[*] And the story had
been covered nationally in the weeks leading up to his
tour.

I was working at another paper at the time. Sources of
mine in the racist world said no one was talking about
cancelling Irving's tour, so I called Christie's Victoria,
B.C., office to see what Irving intended to do. I was
stunned to hear the phone answered by none other than David
Irving himself.

Irving had snuck into the country.

"David! David Irving! What are you doing in Victoria?" I
asked.

"Who is this?" Irving answered in his unmistakable,
overly modulated British accent which sounds a bit like a
BBC announcer from the 70s.

During our brief conversation, he dodged confirming his
identity, refused to comment on his tour plans, and said he
was just answering the phones while Christie was out of the
office.

Here's where that Heisenberg principle pops up.

I was of two minds about Canada
banning Irving. While I had no sympathies with his views
or the movement he offered succour to, I'm no fan of
banning speech and barring the door to ugly ideas.

Clearly, if we ran a story saying "Banned Brit author
sneaks into Canada" the man would be scooped up by police,
jailed and thrown out of the country in fairly short
order.

If we did nothing, he could make a speech or two, collect
a few tens of thousands of dollars and then slip back into
the United States leaving Canadian immigration officials
red-faced with embarrassment and Canadian anti-racists
red-faced with anger.

After discussing the matter with my editor, I was told we
needed proof Irving had answered a lawyer's phone in
Victoria and we decided we needed comment from immigration
authorities.

That last decision sealed Irving's fate.

For if we had just run a story the next day that Irving
had snuck into Canada for a speech last night, he would have
had time to sneak back out again.

But calling immigration authorities for comment would set
them scrambling for him.

So what do you do?

I couldn't hide behind objectivity, or simply "getting
the story." My actions would have clear -- and clearly
negative -- consequences for Irving.

I hooked a tape recorder to the phone and called him
back.

It was a hilarious conversation.

Unable to resist the offer of an intellectual sparring
partner, Irving didn't do the sensible thing and simply hang
up. He argued.

Irving talked about himself in the third person and
attacked the Canadian government, Jewish organizations and
the media.

But because he couldn't admit who he was, he ended up
using tortuous constructions like "If I were to be David
Irving, I can assure you that I would offer no comment to a
Bill Dunphy, a journalist who writes scurrilous articles for
the tabloid press..."

When I was finished with him, I called a contact in
Canada Immigration and told him I'd just interviewed David
Irving in Canada, and what was the department's
reaction?

His
immediate reaction was unsuitable for publication. His next
move was to get a Canada-wide warrant for Irving's arrest
and alert the RCMP in Victoria.

Five hours later, Irving was hauled out of his meeting in
handcuffs.

He was eventually banned from Canada for life, and that
ban has been used by Australia and South Africa to bar him
from their countries as well.

Website comment: * There was no
such Immigration decision. Mr Irving legally entered Canada
at the Niagara Falls post by car on Oct 26, 1989 and his
passport was stamped accordingly. Incidentally, Prof. Werner
Heisenberg (whom "amateur historian" David Irving
interviewed twice) wrote a brilliant whole page review of
Irving's book The German Atomic
Bomb in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in
about 1968.